Before 1914 great forts in which were mounted the most modern and the most destructive artillery ever devised by man, commanded the whole country far beyond the Moselle into Germany. Every hill-top bristled with them, smaller batteries were in every coign of vantage, while those narrow mountain passes could also be closed at any moment by being blown up when the signal was given against the Hun invaders.
On the German side were many fortresses, but none was so strong as these, for the efforts of the French Ministry of War had, ever since the fall of Napoleon III., been directed towards rendering the Côtes Lorraines impassable.
As one stands upon the road outside the tiny hamlet of Harville—a quaint but half-destroyed little place consisting of one long street of ruined whitewashed houses—and looks towards the hills eastward, low concrete walls can be seen, half hidden, but speaking mutely of the withering storm of shell that had, in 1914, burst from them and swept the land.
Much can be seen of that chain of damaged fortresses, and the details of most of them are now known. Of those great ugly fortifications at Moulainville—the Belrupt Fort, which overlooks the Meuse; the Daumaumont, commanding the road from Conflans to Azannes; the Paroches, which stands directly over the highway from the Moselle at Moussin—we have heard valiant stories, how the brave French defended them against the armies of the Crown Prince.
It was not upon these, however, that the French Army relied when, in August, 1914, the clash of war resounded along that pleasant fertile valley, where the sun seems ever to shine and the crops never fail. Hidden away from the sight of passers-by upon the roads, protected from sight by lines of sentries night and day, and unapproachable, save by those immediately connected with them, were the secret defences, huge forts with long-range ordnance, which rose, fired, and disappeared again, offering no mark for the enemy. Constructed in strictest secrecy, there were a dozen of such fortresses, the true details of which the Huns vainly endeavoured to learn while they were war-plotting. Many a spy of the Kaiser had tried to pry there and had been arrested and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment.
Those defences, placed at intervals along the chain of hills right from Apremont away to Bezonvaux, had been the greatest secret which France possessed.
Within three kilomètres of the mouth of the pass at Haudiomont, at a short distance from the road and at the edge of a wood, stood the ancient Château de Lérouville, a small picturesque place of the days of Louis XIV., with pretty lawns and old-world gardens—a château only in the sense of being a country house and the residence of Paul Le Pontois, once a captain in the French Army, but now retired.
Shut off from the road by a high old wall, with great iron gates, it was approached by a wide carriage-drive through a well-kept flower-garden to a long terrasse which ran the whole length of the house, and whereon, in summer, it was the habit of the family to take their meals.
Upon this veranda, one morning about ten days after the dinner party at Hill Street, Sir Hugh, in a suit of light grey tweed, was standing chatting with his son-in-law, a tall, brown-bearded, soldierly-looking man.
The autumn sun shone brightly over the rich vinelands, beyond which stretched what was once the German Empire.